Computers have penetrated into each family and enterprise to become an indispensable electronic product in our modern daily lives. Accessory products, such as, scanners have become important input devices for computers. For example, scanners are widely used as a computer accessory device in the production of professional web pages.
Scanners may be used to scan paper documents as well as positive and negative film. Both the positive film and negative film comprise transparent materials. Specifically, the positive film is a lantern slide that keeps original color data during scanning development. The negative film has a color with a contrast color transition (such as: black changes to white, and red changes to green).
Characteristics of the negative film vary according to factors including age of the film and manner of storage. These varying characteristics make negative film scanning difficult. The scanner may therefore need to correct the negative film image.
FIG. 1 describes a hardware correction scheme where a correction film 2 having an age close to that of the negative film 1 is directly pasted adhesively onto the front side of the negative film 1 to be scanned. The interior of the negative film 1 has plural image data 3. During pre-scanning by a scanner, correction parameter values are obtained from the correction film 2. During scanning, the scanner scans and corrects the negative film 1 image data according to the correction parameter values obtained from the correction film 2.
However, shortcomings still exist.